The Bridges Of Madison County Faberry Style
by lelephantenchaine
Summary: The story of Quinn Fabray, the photographer and free spirit searching for the covered bridges of Madison County, and Rachel Berry, the farm wife waiting for the fulfillment of a girlhood dream, THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY shows us what it is to love and be loved so intensely that life is never the same again.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer**_**:** I do not own Glee or The bridges of Madison County _

Quinn Fabray

On the morning of August 8, 1965, Quinn Fabray locked the door to her small two-room apartment on the third door of a rambling house in Bellingham, Washington. She carried a knapsack full of photography equipment and a suitcase down wooden stairs and through a hallway to the back, where her old Chevrolet pickup truck was parked in a space reserved for residents of the building.

Another knapsack, a medium-size ice chest, two tripods, cartons of Camel cigarettes, a Thermos, and a bag of fruit were already inside. In the truck box was a guitar case. Quinn arranged the knapsacks on the seat and put the cooler and tripods on the floor. She climbed into the truck box and wedged the guitar case and suitcase into a corner of the box, bracing them with a spare tire lying on its side and securing both cases to the tire with a length of clothesline rope. Under the worn spare she shoved a black tarpaulin.

She stepped in behind the wheel, lit a Camel, and went through her mental checklist: two hundred rolls of assorted film, mostly slow-speed Kodachrome; tripods; cooler; three cameras and five lenses; jeans and khaki slacks; shirts; wearing photo vest. Okay. Anything else she could buy on the road if she had forgotten it.

Quinn wore faded Levi's, well-used Red Wing field boots, a khaki shirt, and orange suspenders. On her leather belt was fastened a Swiss Army knife in its own case.

She looked at her watch: eight-seventeen. The truck started on the second try, and she backed out, shifted gears, and moved slowly down the alley under hazy sun. Through the streets of Bellingham she went, heading south on Washington 11, running along the coast of Puget Sound for a few miles, then following the highway as it swung east a little before meeting U .S. Route 20.

Turning into the sun, she began the long, winding drive through the Cascades. She liked this country and felt unpressed, stopping now and then to make notes about interesting possibilities for future expeditions or to shoot what she called "memory snapshots." The purpose of these cursory photographs was to remind her of places she might want to visit again and approach more seriously. In late afternoon she turned north at Spokane, picking up U .S. Route 2, which would take him halfway across the northern United States to Duluth, Minnesota.

She wished for the thousandth time in her life that she had a dog, a golden retriever, maybe, for travels like this and to keep her company at home. But she was frequently away, overseas much of the time, and it would not be fair to the animal. Still, she thought about it anyway. In a few years she would be getting too old for the hard fieldwork. "I might get a dog then," she said to the coniferous green rolling by his truck window.

Drives like this always put her into a taking-stock mood. The dog was part of it. Quinn Fabray was as alone as it's possible to be- an only child, parents both dead, distant relatives who had lost track of her and she of them, no close friends.

She knew the names of the man who owned the corner market in Bellingham and the proprietor of the photographic store where she bought her supplies. She also had formal, professional relationships with several magazine editors. Other than that, she knew scarcely anyone well, nor they her. Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and she was something of a gypsy.

She thought about Puck. He had left her nine years ago after five years of marriage. She was fifty-two now; that would make her just under forty. Puck had dreams of becoming a musician, a folksinger. He knew all of the Weavers' songs and sang them pretty well in the coffeehouses of Seattle. When she was home in the old days, she drove to his gigs and sat in the audience while he sang.

Her long absences- two or three months sometimes- were hard on the marriage. She knew that. He was aware of what she did when they decided to get married, and each of them had a vague sense that it could all be handled somehow. It couldn't. When she came home from photographing a story in Iceland, he was gone. The note read: "Quinn, it didn't work out. I left you the Harmony guitar. Stay in touch."

She didn't stay in touch. Neither did he. She signed the divorce papers when they arrived a year later and caught a plane for Australia the next day. He had asked for nothing except her freedom.

At Kalispell, Montana, she stopped for the night, late. The Cozy Inn looked inexpensive, and was. She carried her gear into a room containing two table lamps, one of which had a burned-out bulb. Lying in bed, reading The Green Hills of Africa and drinking a beer, she could smell the paper mills of Kalispell. In the morning she jogged for forty minutes, did fifty push-ups, and used her cameras as small hand weights to complete the routine.

Across the top of Montana she drove, into North Dakota and the spare, flat country she found as fascinating as the mountains or the sea. There was a kind of austere beauty to this place, and she stopped several times, set up a tripod, and shot some black-and- whites of old farm buildings. This landscape appealed to her minimalist leanings. The Indian reservations were depressing, for all of the reasons everybody knows and ignores. Those kinds of settlements were no better in northwestern Washington, though, or anywhere else she had seen them.

On the morning of August 14, two hours out of Duluth, she sliced northeast and took a back road up to Hibbing and the iron mines. Red dust floated in the air, and there were big machines and trains specially designed to haul the ore to freighters at Two Harbors on Lake Superior. She spent an afternoon looking around Hibbing and found it not to her liking, even if Bob Zimmerman-Dylan was from there originally.

The only song of Dylan's she had ever really cared for was "Girl from the North Country." She could play and sing that one, and she hummed the words to herself as she left behind the place with giant red holes in the earth. Puck had shown her some chords and how to handle basic arpeggios to accompany herself. "He left me with more than I left him," she said once to a boozy riverboat pilot in a place called McElroy's Bar, somewhere in the Amazon basin. And it was true.

The Superior National Forest was nice, real nice. Voyageur country. When she was young, she'd wished the old voyageur days were not over so she could become one. She drove by meadows, saw three moose, a red fox, and lots of deer. At a pond she stopped and shot some reflections on the water made by an odd-shaped tree branch. When she finished she sat on the running board of her truck, drinking coffee, smoking a Camel, and listening to the wind in the birch trees.

He had been to most of the places posted on his boyhood walls and marveled she actually was there when she visited them, sitting in the Raffles Bar, riding up the Amazon on a chugging riverboat, and rocking on a camel through the Rajasthani desert.

The Lake Superior shore was as nice as she'd heard it was. She marked down several locations for future reference, took some shots to jog his memory later on, and headed south along the Mississippi River toward Iowa. She'd never been to Iowa but was taken with the hills of the northeast part along the big river. Stopping in the little town of Clayton, she stayed at a fisherman's motel and spent two mornings shooting the towboats and an afternoon on a tug at the invitation of a pilot she met in a local bar.

Cutting over to U .S. Route 65, she went through Des Moines early on a Monday morning, August 16, 1965, swung west at Iowa 92, and headed for Madison County and the covered bridges that were supposed to be there, according to National Geographic. They were there all right, the man in the Texaco station said so and gave her directions, just fairish directions, to all seven.

The first six were easy to find as she mapped out her strategy for photographing them. The seventh, a place called Roseman Bridge, eluded her. It was hot, she was hot, Harry- her truck- was hot, and she was wandering around on gravel roads that seemed to lead nowhere except to the next gravel road.

In foreign countries, her rule of thumb was, "Ask three times." She had discovered that three responses, even if they all were wrong, gradually vectored you in to where you wanted to go. Maybe twice would be enough here.

A mailbox was coming up, sitting at the end of a lane about one hundred yards long. The name on the box read "Finn Hudson, RR 2 ." She slowed down and turned up the lane, looking for guidance.

When she pulled into the yard, a woman was sitting on the front porch. It looked cool there, and she was drinking something that looked even cooler. She came off the porch toward her.

She stepped from the truck and looked at her, looked closer, and then closer still. She was lovely, or had been at one time, or could be again. And immediately she began to feel the old clumsiness she always suffered around women to whom she was even faintly attracted.

_**Thanks For reading :)**_


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer**_**:** I do not own Glee or The bridges of Madison County They belong to some very talented folks!_

_Enjoy :)_

Rachel Berry

She had been sitting on the front porch swing, drinking iced tea, casually watching the dust spiral up from under a pickup coming down the county road. The truck was moving slowly, as if the driver were looking for something, stopped just short of her lane, then turned up it toward the house. Oh, God, she had thought. Who's this?

She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a faded blue workshirt with the sleeves rolled up, shirttail out. Her long brown hair was fastened up by a tortoiseshell comb her father had given her when she left the old country. The truck rolled up the lane and stopped near the gate to the wire fence surrounding the house.

Rachel stepped off the porch and walked unhurriedly through the grass toward the gate. And out of the pickup came Quinn Fabray, looking like some vision from a never-written book called An Illustrated History of Shamans.

Her tan military-style shirt was tacked down to her back with perspiration; there were wide, dark circles of it under her arms. The top three buttons were undone, and she could see chest just below the plain silver chain around her neck. Over her shoulders were wide orange suspenders, the kind worn by people who spent a lot of time in wilderness areas.

She smiled. "I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm looking for a covered bridge out this way, and I can't find it . l think I'm temporarily lost." Quinn wiped her forehead with a blue bandanna and smiled again.

Quinn eyes looked directly at her, and she felt something jump inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the blonde hair, the easy ways she moved her body, old ways, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen.

The generations must roll, and the ways whisper only of that single requirement, nothing more. The power is infinite, the design supremely elegant. The ways are unswerving, their goal is clear. The ways are simple; we have made them seem complicated. Rachel sensed this without knowing she was sensing it , sensed it at the level of her cells. And there began the thing that would change her forever.

A car went past on the road, trailing dust behind it, and honked. Rachel waved back at Mike Chang's brown arm sticking out of his Chevy and turned back to the stranger."You're pretty close. The bridge is only about two miles from here." Then, after twenty years of living the close life, a life of circumscribed behavior and. hidden feelings demanded by a rural culture, Rachel Berry surprised herself by saying, "I'll be glad to show it to you, if you want."

Why she did that, she never had been sure. A young girl's feelings rising like a bubble through water and bursting out, maybe, after all these years. She was not shy, but not forward, either. The only thing she could ever conclude was that Quinn Fabray had drawn her in somehow, after only a few seconds of looking at her.

Quinn was obviously taken aback, slightly, by her offer. But she recovered quickly and with a serious look on her face said she'd appreciate that. From the back steps Rachel picked up the cowboy boots she wore for farm chores and walked out to Quinn´s truck, following her around to the passenger side.

"Just take me a minute to make room for you; lots of gear 'n' stuff in here." Quinn mumbled mostly to herself as she worked, and Rachel could tell she was a little flustered, and a little shy about the whole affair.

Quinn was rearranging canvas bags and tripods, a Thermos bottle and paper sacks. In the back of the pickup were an old tan Samsonite suitcase and a guitar case, both dusty and battered, both tied to a spare tire with a piece of clothesline rope.

The door of the truck swung shut, banging Quinn in the rear as she mumbled and sorted and stuffed paper coffee cups and banana peels into a brown grocery bag that she tossed into the truck box when she was finished. Finally she removed a blue-and-white ice chest and put that in the back as well. In faded red paint on the green truck door was printed "Fabray Photography,Bellingham, Washington."

"Okay, I think you can squeeze in there now." Quinn held the door, closed it behind Rachel, then went around to the driver's side and with a peculiar,animal-like grace stepped in behind the wheel. Quinn looked at her, just a quick glance, smiled slightly,and said, "Which way?"

"Right." She motioned with her hand. Quinn turned the key, and the out-of-tune engine ground to a start. Along the lane toward the road, bouncing, her legs working the pedals automatically, old Levi's running down over leather-laced, brown field boots t hat had seen lots of foot miles go by.

Quinn leaned over and reached into the glove compartment, her forearm accidentally brushing across Rachel´s lower thigh. Looking half out the windshield and half into the compartment, she took out a business card and handed it to her. "Quinn Fabray, Writer-Photographer." Her address was printed there, along with a phone number.

"I'm out here on assignment for National Geographic," she said. "You familiar with the magazine?"

"Yes." Rachel nodded, thinking, Isn't everybody?

"They're doing a piece on covered bridges, and Madison County, Iowa, apparently has some interesting ones. I've located six of them, but I guess there's at least one more, and it's supposed to be out in this direction."

"It's called Roseman Bridge," said Rachel over the noise of the wind and tires and engine. Her voice sounded strange, as if it belonged to someone else, to a teenage girl leaning out of a window in Naples, looking far down city streets toward the trains or out at the harbor and thinking of distant lovers yet to come. As she spoke, she watched the muscles in Quinn forearm flex when she shifted gears.

Two knapsacks were beside her. The flap of one was closed, but the other was folded back, and she could see the silver-colored top and black back of a camera sticking out. The end of a film box, "Kodachrome II, 25 36 Exposures," was taped to the camera back. Stuffed behind the packs was a tan vest with many pockets. Out of one pocket dangled a thin cord with a plunger on the end.

Behind her feet were two tripods. They were badly scratched, but she could read part of the worn label on one: "Gitzo." When Quinn had opened the glove box, she noticed it was crammed with notebooks, maps, pens, empty film canisters, loose change, and a carton of Camel cigarettes.

"Turn right at the next corner," she said. That gave her an excuse to glance at the profile of Quinn Fabray. Her skin milky white and look smooth. She had nice lips; for some reason she had noticed that right away. And Quinn´s nose was perfect; there was something, something about her. Something very old, something slightly battered by the years, not in her appearance, but in her eyes.

On her left wrist was a complicated-looking watch with a brown, sweat-stained leather band. A silver bracelet with some intricate scrollwork clung to her right wrist. It needed a good rubbing with silver polish, Rachel thought, then chastised herself for being caught up in the trivia of small-town life she had silently rebelled against through the years.

Quinn pulled a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket, shook one halfway out, and offered it to Rachel. For the second time in five minutes, she surprised herself and took the cigarette. What am I doing? she thought. She had smoked years ago but gave it up under the steady thump of criticism from Finn. Quinn shook out another one, put it between her lips, and flicked a gold Zippo lighter into flame, holding it toward Rachel while she kept her eyes on the road.

Rachel cupped her hands around the lighter to hold the wind in abeyance and touched Quinn´s hand to steady it against the bouncing of the truck. It took only an instant for her to light the cigarette, but that was long enough to feel the warmth of her hand.

She leaned back and Quinn swung the lighter toward her own cigarette, expertly forming her wind cup, taking her hands off the steering wheel for no more than a second.

Rachel Berry, farmer's wife, rested against the dusty truck seat, smoked the cigarette, and pointed. "There it is, just around the curve." The old bridge, peeling red in color, tilting slightly from all the years, sat across a small stream.

Quinn had smiled then. she quickly looked at Rachel and said, "It's great. A sunrise shot." Quinn stopped a hundred feet from the bridge and got out, taking the open knapsack with her. "I'm going to do a little reconnaissance for a few minutes, do you mind?" Rachel shook her head and smiled back.

Rachel watched her walk up the country road, taking a camera from the knapsack and then slinging the bag over her left shoulder. Quinn had done that thousands of times, that exact movement. She could tell by the fluidity of it. As Quinn walked, her head never stopped moving, looking from side to side, then at the bridge, then at the trees behind the bridge. Once she turned and looked back at Rachel, her face serious.

In contrast with the local folks, who fed on gravy and potatoes and red meat, three times a day for some of them, Quinn Fabray looked as if she ate nothing but fruit and nuts and vegetables. Hard, she thought. She looks hard, physically.

It was quiet. A redwing blackbird sat on fence wire and looked in at her. A meadowlark called from the roadside grass. Nothing else moved in the white sun of August.

Just short of the bridge, Quinn stopped. She stood there for a moment, then squatted down, looking through the camera. She walked to the other side of the road and did the same thing. Then moved into the cover of the bridge and studied the beams and floor planks, looked at the stream below through a hole in the side.

Rachel snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray, swung open the door, and put her boots on the gravel. She glanced around to make sure none of her neighbors' cars were coming and walked toward the bridge. The sun was a hammer in late afternoon, and it looked cooler inside the bridge. She could see Quinn silhouette at the other end until she disappeared down the incline toward the stream.

Inside, she could hear pigeons burbling softly in their nests under the eves and put the palm of her hand on the side planking, feeling the warmth. Graffiti was scrawled on some of the planks: "Jimbo-Denison, Iowa." "Sherry + Dubby." "Go Hawks!" The pigeons kept on burbling softly.

Rachel peeked through a crack between two of the side planks, down toward the stream where Quinn had gone. she was standing on a rock in the middle of the little river, looking toward the bridge, and Rachel was startled to see her wave. Quinn jumped back to the bank and moved easily up the steep grade. Rachel kept watching the water until she sensed Quinn boots on the bridge flooring.

"It's real nice, real pretty here," Quinn said, her voice reverberating inside the covered bridge.

Rachel nodded. "Yes, it is . We take these old bridges for granted around here and don't think much about them."

Quinn walked to her and held out a small bouquet of wildflowers, black-eyed Susans. "Thanks for the guided tour."she smiled softly. "I'll come back at dawn one of these days and get my shots." Rachel felt something inside of her again. Flowers. Nobody gave her flowers, even on special occasions.

"I don't know your name," Quinn said. Rachel realized then that she had not told her and felt dumb about that. When she did, Quinn nodded and said, "I caught the smallest trace of an accent. Italian?"

"Yes. A long time ago."

The green truck again. Along the gravel roads with the sun lowering itself. Twice they met cars, but it was nobody Rachel knew. In the four minutes it took to reach the farm, she drifted, feeling unraveled and strange. More of Quinn Fabray, writer-photographer, that's what she wanted. She wanted to know more and clutched the flowers on her lap, held them straight up, like a schoolgirl coming back from an outing.

The blood was in her face. She could feel it . She hadn't done anything or said anything, but she felt as if she had. The truck radio, indistinguishable almost in the roar of road and wind, carried a steel guitar song, followed by the five o'clock news.

Quinn turned the truck up the lane. "Finn is your husband?" She had seen the mailbox.

"Yes," said Rachel, slightly short of breath. Once her words started, they kept on coming. "It's pretty hot. Would you like an ice tea?"

Quinn looked over at her. "If it's all right, I sure would."

"It's all right," she said.

She directed Quinn casually, she hoped to park the pickup around behind the house. What she didn't need was for Finn to come home and have one of the neighbor men say, "Hey ; havin' some work done at the place? Saw a green pickup there last week. Knew Rach was home so I did'n bother to check on it."

Up broken cement steps to the back porch door. Quinn held the door for her, carrying her camera knapsacks. "Awful hot to leave the equipment in the truck," she had said when she pulled them out. A little cooler in the kitchen, but still hot.

The collie snuffled around Quinn's boots, then went out on the back porch and flopped down while Rachel removed ice from metal trays and poured sun tea from a half-gallon glass jug. She knew Quinn was watching her as she sat at the kitchen table.

"Lemon?" "Yes, please." "Sugar?" "No, thanks."

Rachel set the glass before Quinn. Put her own on the other side of the Formica-topped table and her bouquet in water, in an old jelly glass with renderings of Donald Duck on it . Leaning against the counter, she balanced on one leg, bent over, and took off a boot. Stood on her bare foot and reversed the process for the other boot.

Quinn took a small drink of tea and watched her. She was about five feet two, fortyish or a little older, pretty face, and a fine, warm body. But there were pretty women everywhere she traveled. Such physical matters were nice, yet, to her, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That's why she found most young people unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested her.

But there was something in Rachel that did interest her. There was intelligence; she could sense that. And there was passion, though she couldn't quite grasp what that passion was directed toward or if it was directed at all.

Later, Quinn would tell her that in ways undefinable, watching her take off her boots that day was one of the most sensual moments she could remember. Why was not important. That was not the way Quinn approached her life. "Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away."That's what Quinn had said.

Rachel sat at the table, one leg curled under her, and pulled back strands of hair that had fallen over her face, refastening them with the tortoiseshell comb. Then, remembering, she rose and went to the end cupboard, took down an ashtray, and set it on the table where Quinn could reach

With that tacit permission, Quinn pulled out a pack of Camels and held it toward Rachel. She took one and noticed it was slightly wet from her heavy perspiring. Same routine. Quinn held the gold Zippo, Rachel touched Quinn´s hand to steady it, felt her skin with her fingertips, and sat back. The cigarette tasted wonderful, and she smiled.

"What is it you do, exactly- I mean with the photography?"

Quinn looked at her cigarette and spoke quietly. "I'm a contract shooter- uh, photographer- for National Geographic, part of the time. I get ideas, sell them to the magazine, and do the shoot. Or they have something they want done and contact me. Not a lot of room for artistic expression; it's a pretty conservative publication. But the pay is decent. Not great, but decent, and steady. The rest of the time I write and photograph on my own hook and send pieces to other magazines. If things get tough, I do corporate work, though I find that awfully confining.

"Sometimes I write poetry, just for myself. Now and then I try to write a little fiction, but I don't seem to have a feeling for it. I live north of Seattle and work around that area quite a bit. I like shooting the fishing boats and Indian settlements and landscapes.

"The Geographic work often keeps me at a location for a couple of months, particularly for a major piece on something like part of the Amazon or the North African desert. Ordinarily I fly to an assignment like this and rent a car. But I felt like driving through some places and scouting them out for future reference. I came down along Lake Superior; I'll go back through the Black Hills. How about you?"

Rachel hadn't expected her to ask. She stammered for a moment. "Oh, gosh, nothing like you do. I got my degree in comparative literature. Winterset was having trouble finding teachers when I arrived here in 1946, and the fact that I was married to a local man who was a veteran made me acceptable. So I picked up a teaching certificate and taught high school English for a few years. But Finn didn't like the idea of me working. He said he could support us, and there was no need for it, particularly when our two children were growing. So I stopped and became a farm wife full-time. That's it."

She noticed her iced tea was almost gone and poured quinn some more from the jug.

"Thanks. How do you like it here in Iowa?" There was a moment of truth in this. She knew it. The standard reply was, "Just fine. It's quiet. The people are real nice."

She didn't answer immediately. "Could I have another cigarette?" Again the pack of Camels, again the lighter, again touching her hand, lightly. Sunlight walked across the back porch floor and onto the dog, who got up and moved out of sight. Rachel, for the first time, looked into the eyes of Quinn Fabray.

"I'm supposed to say, 'Just fine. It's quiet. The people are real nice.' All of that's true, mostly. It is quiet. And the people are nice, in certain ways. We all help each other out. If someone gets sick or hurt, the neighbors pitch in and pick corn or harvest oats or do whatever needs to be done. In town, you can leave your car unlocked and let your children run without worrying about them. There are a lot of good things about the people here, and I respect them for those qualities.

"But" -she hesitated, smoked, looked across the table at Quinn Fabray- "it's not what I dreamed about as a girl." The confession, at last. The words had been there for years, and she had never said them. She had said them now to a woman with a green pickup truck from Bellingham, Washington.

Quinn said nothing for a moment. Then: "I scribbled something in my notebook the other day for future use, just had the idea while driving along; that happens a lot. It goes like this: 'The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.' I'm not sure what that means, but I'll use it somewhere. So I think I kind of know how you feel."

Rachel smiled at her then. For the first time, she smiled warm and deep. And the gambler's instincts took over. "Would you like to stay for supper? My family's away, so I don't have too much on hand, but I can figure out something."

"Well, I get pretty tired of grocery stores and restaurants. That's for sure. So if it's not too much bother, I'd like that."

"You like pork chops? I could fix that with some vegetables from the garden."

"Just the vegetables would be fine for me. I don't eat meat. Haven't for years. No big deal, I just feel better that way."

Rachel smiled again. "Around here that point of view would not be popular. Finn and his friends would say you're trying to destroy their livelihood. I don't eat much meat myself; I'm not sure why, I just don't care for it. But every time I try a meatless supper on the family, there are howls of rebellion. So I've pretty much given up trying. It'll be fun figuring out something different for a change."

"Okay, but don't go to a lot of trouble on my account. Listen, I've got a bunch of film in my cooler. I need to dump out the melted ice water and organize things a bit. It'll take me a little while." She stood up and drank the last of his tea.

She watched Quinn go through the kitchen doorway, across the porch, and into the yard. She didn't let the screen door bang like everyone else did but instead shut it gently. Just before Quinn went out, she squatted down to pet the collie, who acknowledged the attention with several sloppy licks along her arms.

Upstairs, Rachel ran a quick bath and, while drying off, peered over the top of the cafe curtain toward the farmyard. Quinn´s suitcase was open, and she was washing herself, using the old hand pump. She should have told her she could shower in the house if she wanted. She had meant to, balked for a moment at the level of familiarity that implied to her, and then, floating around in her own confusion, forgot to say anything.

But Quinn Fabray had washed up under worse conditions. Out of buckets of rancid water in tiger country, out of her canteen in the desert. In her farmyard, she had stripped to the waist and was using her dirty shirt as a combination washcloth and towel. "A towel," she scolded herself. "At least a towel; I could have done that for her."

During the last shopping trip to Des Moines, she had bought new perfume "Wind Song" and she used it now, sparingly. What to put on? It didn't seem right for her to dress up too much, since Quinn was still in her working clothes. Long-sleeved white shirt, sleeves rolled to just below the elbows, a clean pair of jeans, sandals. The gold hoop earrings Finn said made her look like a hussy and a gold bracelet. Hair pulled back with a clip, hanging down her back. That felt right.

When she came into the kitchen, Quinn was sitting there with her knapsacks and cooler, wearing a clean khaki shirt, with the orange suspenders running over it . On the table were three cameras and five lenses, and a fresh package of Camels. The cameras all said "Nikon" on them. So did the black lenses, short ones and middling ones and a longer one. The equipment was scratched, dented in places. But he handled it carefully, yet casually, wiping and brushing and blowing.

Quinn looked up at her, serious face again, shy face. "I have some beer in the cooler. Like one?"

"Yes, that would be nice."

She took out two bottles of Budweiser. When she lifted the lid, Rachel could see clear plastic boxes with film stacked like cordwood in them. There were four more bottles of beer besides the two she removed.

Rachel slid open a drawer to look for an opener. But Quinn said, "I've got it ." She took the Swiss Army knife from its case on her belt and flicked out the bottle opener on it, using it expertly.

She handed her a bottle and raised hers in a half salute: "To covered bridges in the late afternoon or, better yet, on warm, red mornings." Quinn grinned.

Rachel said nothing but smiled softly and raised her bottle a little, hesitantly, awkwardly. A strange stranger, flowers, perfume, beer, and a toast on a hot Monday in late summer. It was almost more than she could deal with.

"There was somebody a long time ago who was thirsty on an August afternoon. Whoever it was studied their thirst, rigged up some stuff, and invented beer. That's where it came from, and a problem was solved." Quinn was working on a camera, almost talking to it as she tightened a screw on its top with a jewelers screwdriver.

"I'm going out to the garden for a minute. I'll be right back."

Quinn looked up. "Need help?"

Rachel shook her head and walked past her, feeling Quinn´s eyes on her hips, wondering if she watched her all the way across the porch, guessing that she did.

She was right. Quinn watched her. Shook her head and looked again. Watched her body, thought of the intelligence she knew Rachel possessed, wondered about the other things she sensed in her. She was drawn to her, fighting it back.

The garden was in shade now. Rachel moved through it with a dishpan done in cracked white enamel. She gathered carrots and parsley, some parsnips and onions and turnips.

When she entered the kitchen, Quinn was repacking the knapsacks, neatly and precisely, she noticed. Everything obviously had its place and always was placed in its place. She had finished her beer and opened two more, even though Rachel was not quite done with hers. She tilted back her head and finished the first one, handing Quinn the empty bottle.

"Can I do something?" Quinn asked.

"You can bring in the watermelon from the porch and a few potatoes from the bucket out there."

She moved so easily that Rachel was amazed at how quickly she went to the porch and returned, melon under her arm, four potatoes in her hands. "Enough?"

She nodded, thinking how ghostlike she seemed. Quinn set them on the counter beside the sink where she was cleaning the garden vegetables and returned to her chair, lighting a Camel as she sat down.

"How long will you be here?" she asked, looking down at the vegetables she was working on.

"I'm not sure. This is a slow time for me, and my deadline for the bridge pictures is still three weeks away. As long as it takes to get it right, I guess. Probably about a week."

"Where are you staying? In town?"

"Yes. A little place with cabins. Something-or-other Motor Court. I just checked in this morning. Haven't even unloaded my gear yet."

"That's the only place to stay, except for Mrs. Carlson's; she takes in roomers. The restaurants will be a disappointment, though, particularly for someone with your eating habits."

"I know. It's an old story. But I've learned to make do. This time of year it's not so bad; I can find fresh produce in the stores and at stands along the road. Bread and a few other things, and I make it work, approximately. It's nice to be invited out like this, though. I appreciate it."

She reached along the counter and flipped on a small radio, one with only two dials and tan cloth covering the speakers. "With time in my pocket, and the weather on my side..." a voice sang, guitars chunking along underneath. She kept the volume low.

"I'm pretty good at chopping vegetables," Quinn offered.

"Okay, there's the cutting board, a knife's in the drawer right below it . I'm going to fix a stew, so kind of cube the vegetables."

Quinn stood two feet from her, looking down, cutting and chopping the carrots and turnips, parsnips and onions. Rachel peeled potatoes into the sink, aware of being so close to a strange woman. She had never thought of peeling potatoes as having little slanting feelings connected with it.

**Once again THANK YOU for reading !**


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer**_**:** I do not own Glee or The bridges of Madison County They belong to some very talented folks!_

_Enjoy :)_

"You play the guitar? l saw the case in your truck."

"A little bit. It keeps me company, not too much more than that. My husband was an early folkie, way before the music became popular, and he got me going on it ."

Rachel had stiffened slightly at the word husband. Why, she didn't know. She had a right to be married, but somehow it didn't fit her. She didn't want her to be married.

"He couldn't stand the long shoots when I'd be gone for months. I don't blame him. He pulled out nine years ago. Divorced me a year later. We never had children, so it wasn't complicated. Took one guitar, left the cheap with me."

"You hear from him?"

"No, never."

That was all she said. Rachel didn't push it . But she felt better, selfishly, and wondered again why she should care one way or the other.

"I've been to Italy, twice," Quinn said. "Where you from, originally?"

"Naples."

"Never made it there. I was in the north once, doing some shooting along the River Po. Then again for a piece on Sicily."

Rachel peeled potatoes, thinking of Italy for a moment, conscious of Quinn Fabray beside her.

Clouds had moved up in the west, splitting the sun into rays that splayed in several directions. Quinn looked out the window above the sink and said, "God light. Calendar companies love it . So do religious magazines."

"Your work sounds interesting," Rachel said. She felt a need to keep neutral conversation going.

"It is. I like it a lot. I like the road, and I like making pictures."

She noticed she'd said "making" pictures. "You make pictures, not take them?"

"Yes. At least that's how I think of it . That's the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living. When I'm finished with that bridge we saw today, it won't look quite like you expect. I'll have made it into something of my own, by lens choice, or camera angle, or general composition, and most likely by some combination of all of those.

"I don't just take things as given; I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image. The magazine has its own style and demands, and I don't always agree with the editors' taste; in fact, most of the time I don't. And that bothers them, even though they decide what goes in and what gets left out. I guess they know their readership, but I wish they'd take a few more chances now and then. I tell them that, and it bothers them.

'That's the problem in earning a living through an art form. You're always dealing with markets, and markets- mass markets-are designed to suit average tastes. That's where the numbers are. That's the reality, I guess. But, as I said, it can become pretty confining. They let me keep the shots they don't use, so at least I have my own private files of stuff I like.

"And, once in a while, another magazine will take one or two, or I can write an article on a place I've been and illustrate it with something a little more daring than National Geographic prefers.

"Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic passion than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity,give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.

"Profit and subscriptions and the rest of that stuff dominate art. We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.

"The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers.' I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars."

Rachel laughed quietly, thinking about safety and comfort.

"But I'm not complaining too much. Like I said, the traveling is good, and I like fooling with cameras and being out of doors. The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song."

Rachel supposed that, for Quinn Fabray, this was everyday talk. For her, it was the stuff of literature. People in Madison County didn't talk this way,about these things. The talk was about weather and farm prices and new babies and funerals and government programs and athletic teams. Not about art and dreams. Not about realities that kept the music silent, the dreams in a box.

Quinn finished chopping vegetables. "Anything else I can do?"

She shook her head. "No, it's about under control."

Quinn sat at the table again, smoking, taking a drink of beer now and then. Rachel cooked, sipping on her beer between tasks. She could feel the alcohol, even this small amount of it. On New Year's Eve, at the Legion Hall, she and Finn would have some drinks. Other than that, not much, and there seldom was liquor in the house, except for a bottle of brandy she had bought once in some vague spasm of hope for romance in their country lives. The bottle was still unopened.

Vegetable oil, one and one-half cups of vegetables. Cook until light brown. Add flour and mix well. Add water, a pint of it. Add remaining vegetables and seasonings. Cook slowly,about forty minutes.

With the cooking under way, Rachel sat across from her once again. Modest intimacy descended upon the kitchen. It came, somehow, from the cooking. Fixing supper for a stranger, with Quinn chopping turnips and, therefore, distance, beside you, removed some of the strangeness. And with the loss of strangeness, there was space for intimacy.

Quinn pushed the cigarettes toward her, the lighter on top of the package. She shook one out, fumbled with the lighter, felt clumsy. It wouldn't catch. Quinn smiled a little, carefully took the lighter from Rachel´s hand, and flipped the flint wheel twice before it caught, held it and lit the cigarette.

A white sun had turned big red and lay just over the corn fields. Through the kitchen window she could see a hawk riding the early evening updrafts. The seven o'clock news and market summary were on the radio. And Rachel looked across the yellow Formica toward Quinn fabray, who had come a long way to her kitchen. A long way, across more than miles.

"It already smells good," she said, pointing toward the stove. "It smells... quiet." she looked at Rachel.

"Quiet? Could something smell quiet?" She was thinking about the phrase, asking herself. Quinn was right. After the pork chops and steaks and roasts she cooked for the family, this was quiet cooking. No violence involved anywhere down the food chain, except maybe for pulling up the vegetables. The stew cooked quietly and smelled quiet. It was quiet here in the kitchen.

"If you don't mind, tell me a little about your life in Italy." Quinn was stretched out on the chair, her right leg crossed over her left at the ankles.

Silence bothered Rachel around Quinn, so she talked. Told her about her growing years, the private school, the nuns, her parents-housewife, bank manager. About standing along the sea wall as a teenager and watching ships from all over the world. About the American soldiers that came later. About meeting Finn in a cafe where she and some girlfriends were drinking coffee. The war had disrupted lives, and they wondered if they would ever get married. She was silent about Niccolo.

Quinn listened, saying nothing, nodding in understanding occasionally. When she finally paused, she said, "And you have children, did you say?"

"Yes. Michael is seventeen. Carolyn is sixteen. They both go to school in Winterset. They're in 4 -H; that's why they're at the Illinois State Fair. Showing Carolyn's steer.

"Something I've never been able to adapt to, to understand, is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter. I don't dare say anything about it, though. Fin and his friends would be down on me in a flash. But there's some kind of cold, unfeeling contradiction in that business."

She felt guilty mentioning Finn's name. She hadn't done anything, anything at all. Yet she could feel guilt, a guilt born of distant possibilities. And she wondered how to manage the end of the evening and if she had gotten herself into something she couldn't handle. Maybe Quinn would just leave. She seemed pretty quiet, nice enough, even a little bashful.

As they talked on, the evening turned blue, light fog brushing the meadow grass. Quinn opened two more beers for them while Rachel's stew cooked, quietly. She rose and dropped dumplings into boiling water, turned, and leaned against the sink, feeling warm toward Quinn Fabray from Bellingham, Washington. Hoping she wouldn't leave too early.

Quinn ate two helpings of the stew with quiet good manners and told her twice how fine it was. The watermelon was perfect. The beer was cold. The evening was blue. Rachel Berry was forty-five years old, and Hank Snow sang a train song on KMA, Shenandoah, Iowa.

Ancient Evenings, Distant Music

Now what? Thought Rachel. Super over, sitting there.

Quinn took care of it. "How about a walk out in the meadow? It's cooling down a little." When she said yes, Quinn reached into a knapsack and pulled out a camera, draping the strap over her shoulder.

Quinn pushed open the back porch door and held it for her, followed her out, then shut it gently. They went down the cracked sidewalk, across the graveled farmyard, and onto the grass east of the machine shed. The shed smelled like warm grease.

When they came to the fence, Rachel held down the barbed wire with one hand and stepped over it, feeling the dew on her feet around the thin sandal straps. Quinn executed the same maneuver, easily swinging her boots over the wire.

"Do you call this a meadow or a pasture?" Quinn asked.

"Pasture, I guess. The cattle keep the grass short. Watch out for their leavings." A moon nearly full was coming up the eastern sky, which had turned azure with the sun just under the horizon. On the road below, a car rocketed past, loud muffler. The Clark boy. Quarterback on the Winterset team. Dated Judy Leverenson.

It had been a long time since she had taken a walk like this. After supper, which was always at five, there was the television news, then the evening programs, watched by Finn and sometimes by the children when they had finished their homework. Rachel usually read in the kitchen -books from the Winterset library and the book club she belonged to, history and poetry and fiction- or sat on the front porch in good weather. The television bored her.

When Richard would call, "Rach, you've got to see this!" she'd go in and sit with him for a while. Elvis always generated such a summons. So did the Beatles when they first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Finn looked at their hair and kept shaking his head in disbelief and disapproval.

For a short time, red streaks cut across part of the sky. "I call that 'bounce,' " Quinn said, pointing upward. "Most people put their cameras away too soon. After the sun goes down, there's often a period of really nice light and color in the sky, just for a few minutes, when the sun is below the horizon but bounces its light off the sky."

Rachel said nothing, wondering about a woman to whom the difference between a pasture and a meadow seemed important, who got excited about sky color, who wrote a little poetry but not much fiction. Who played the guitar, who earned her living by images and carried her tools in knapsacks. Who seemed like the wind. And moved like it . Came from it, perhaps.

The blonde looked upward, hands in her Levi's pockets, camera hanging against her left hip. "The silver apples of the moon/The golden apples of the sun." Her midrange baritone said the words like that of a professional actress.

Rachel looked over at her. "W. B . Yeats, 'The Song of Wandering Ængus.' "

"Right. Good stuff, Yeats. Realism, economy, sensuousness, beauty, magic. Appeals to my Irish heritage."

Quinn had said it all, right there in five words. Rachel had labored to explain Yeats to the Winterset students but never got through to most of them. She had picked Yeats partly because of what Quinn had just said, thinking all of those qualities would appeal to teenagers whose glands were pounding like the high school marching band at football halftimes. But the bias against poetry they had picked up, the view of it as a product of unsteady masculinity, was too much even for Yeats to overcome.

She remembered Matthew Clark looking at the boy beside him and then forming his hands as if to cup them over a woman's breasts when she read, "The golden apples of the sun." They had snickered, and the girls in the back row with them blushed.

They would live with those attitudes all their lives. That's what had discouraged her, knowing that, and she felt compromised and alone, in spite of the outward friendliness of the community. Poets were not welcome here. The people of Madison County liked to say, compensating for their own self-imposed sense of cultural inferiority, "This is a good place to raise kids." And she always felt like responding, "But is it a good place to raise adults?"

Without any conscious plan, they had walked slowly into the pasture a few hundred yards, made a loop, and were headed back toward the house. Darkness came about them as they crossed the fence, with Quinn pushing down the wire for her this time.

She remembered the brandy."I have some brandy. Or would you like some coffee?"

"Is the possibility of both open?" Her words came out of the darkness. Rachel knew she was smiling.

As they came into the circle inscribed on grass and gravel by the yard light, she answered, "Of course," hearing the sound of something in her voice that worried her. It was the sound of easy laughter in the cafes of Naples.

It was difficult finding two cups without some kind of chip on them. Though she was sure that chipped cups were part of Quinn´s life, she wanted perfect ones this time. The brandy glasses, two of them back in the cupboard, turned upside down, had never been used, like the brandy. She had to stretch on her tiptoes to reach them and was aware of her wet sandals and the jeans stretched tight across her bottom.

Quinn sat on the same chair she had used before and watched Rachel. The old ways. The old ways coming into her again. Quinn wondered how Rachel hair would feel to her touch, how the curve of her back would fit her hand, how she would feel underneath her.

The old ways struggling against all that is learned, struggling against the propriety drummed in by centuries of culture, the hard rules of civilized woman. She tried to think of something else, photography or the road or covered bridges. Anything but how Rachel looked just now.

But failed and wondered again how it would feel to touch her skin, to put her belly against hers. The questions eternal, and always the same. The goddamned old ways, fighting toward the surface. He pounded them back, pushed them down, lit a Camel, and breathed deeply.

Rachel could feel her eyes on her constantly, though her watching was circumspect, never obvious, never intrusive. She knew that Quinn knew brandy had never been poured into those glasses. And with her Irishman's sense of the tragic, Rachel also knew Quinn felt something about such emptiness. Not pity. That was not what she was about. Sadness, maybe. She could almost hear Quinn´s mind forming the words:

The bottle unopened, and glasses empty, she reached to find them, somewhere north of Middle River, in Iowa. I watched her with eyes that had seen a Jivaro's Amazon and the Silk Road with caravan dust climbing behind me, reaching into unused spaces of Asian sky.

As Rachel stripped the Iowa liquor seal from the top of the brandy bottle, she looked at her fingernails and wished they were longer and better cared for. Farm life did not permit long fingernails. Until now it hadn't mattered.

Brandy, two glasses, on the table. While she arranged the coffee, the blonde opened the bottle and poured just the right amount into each glass. Quinn had dealt with after-dinner brandy before.

She wondered in how many kitchens, how many good restaurants, how many living rooms with subdued light the blonde had practiced that small trade. How many sets of long fingernails had she watched delicately pointing toward her from the stems of brandy glasses, how many pairs of blue-round and brown-oval eyes had looked at her through foreign evenings, while anchored sailboats rocked offshore and water slapped against the quays of ancient ports?

The overhead kitchen light was too bright for coffee and brandy. Rachel Berry, Finn Hudson's wife, would leave it on. Rachel Berry, a woman walking through after-supper grass and leafing through girlhood dreams, would turn it off. A candle was in order, but that would be too much. Quinn might get the wrong idea. She put on the small light over the kitchen sink and turned off the overhead. It was still not perfect, but it was better.

Quinn raised her glass to shoulder level and moved it toward her. "To ancient evenings and distant music." For some reason those words made her take a short, quick breath. But she touched her glass to her, and even though she wanted to say, "To ancient evenings and distant music," she only smiled a little.

They both smoked, saying nothing, drinking brandy, drinking coffee. A pheasant called from the fields. Jack, the collie, barked twice out in the yard. Mosquitoes tested the window screen near the table, and a single moth, circuitous of thought yet sure of instinct, was goaded by the sink light's possibilities.

It was still hot, no breeze, some humidity now. Quinn was perspiring mildly, her top two shirt buttons undone. She was not looking at her directly, though she sensed her peripheral vision could find her, even as Quinn seemed to stare out the window. In the way she was turned, Rachel could see the top of her chest through the open buttons of her shirt and small beads of moisture lying there upon her skin.

Rachel was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings. Still, it was time for Quinn to go, she thought. Nine fifty-two on the clock above the refrigerator. Faron Young on the radio. Tune from a few years back: "The Shrine of St. Cecilia ." Roman martyr of the third century A.D., Rachel remembered that. Patron saint of music and the blind.

Quinn´s glass was empty. Just as she swung around from looking out the window, Rachel picked up the brandy bottle by the neck and gestured with it toward the empty glass. Quinn shook her head. "Roseman Bridge at dawn. I'd better get going."

She was relieved. But she sank in disappointment. She turned around inside of herself. Yes, please leave. Have some more brandy. Stay. Go. Faron Young didn't care about her feelings. Neither did the moth above the sink. She didn't know for sure what Quinn Fabray thought.

Quinn stood, swung one knapsack onto her left shoulder, put the other on top of her cooler. Rachel came around the table. Her hand moved toward Rachel, and she took it. '"Thanks for the evening, the supper, the walk. They were all nice. You're a good person, Rachel. Keep the brandy toward the front of the cupboard; maybe it'll work out after a while."

She had known, just as Rachel thought. But she wasn't offended by her words. Quinn was talking about romance, and she meant it in the best possible way. She could tell by the softness of her language, the way she said the words. What she didn't know was that Quinn wanted to shout at the kitchen walls, bas-reliefing her words in the plaster: "For Christ's sake, Finn Hudson, are you as big a fool as I think you must be?"

Rachel followed her out to her truck and stood by while she put her gear into it . The collie came across the yard, sniffing around the truck. "Jack, come here," she whispered sharply, and the dog moved to sit by her, panting.

"Good-bye. Take care," she said, stopping by the truck door to look at Rachel for a moment, straight at her. Then, in one motion, she was behind the wheel and shutting the door after her. Quinn turned the old engine over, stomped at the accelerator, and it rattled into a start. She leaned out the window, grinning, "Tune-up required, I think."

The blonde clutched it, backed up, shifted again, and headed across the yard under the light. Just before she reached the darkness of the lane, her left hand came out of the window and waved back at Rachel. She waved, too, even though she knew Quinn couldn't see it.

**_Thank you very much for reading, for the reviews and the favorites._**

**_Aaaaaand dont worry i am planing on putting a diferent ending to this story :)_**

**_beeeso!_**


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer**_**:** I do not own Glee or The bridges of Madison County They belong to some very talented folks!_

_Enjoy :)_

After Quinn left, Rachel stood before the bureau mirror, naked. Her hips flared only a little from the children, her breasts were still nice and firm, not too large, not too small, belly slightly rounded. She couldn't see her legs in the mirror, but she knew they were still good. She should shave more often, but there didn't seem much point to it.

Finn was interested in sex only occasionally, every couple of months, but it was over fast, rudimentary and unmoving, and he didn't seem to care much about perfume or shaving or any of that. It was easy to get a little sloppy.

She was more of a business partner to him than anything else. Some of her appreciated that. But rustling yet within her was another person who wanted to bathe and perfume herself... and be taken, carried away, and peeled back by a force she could sense, but never articulate, even dimly within her mind.

She dressed again and sat at the kitchen table writing on half a sheet of plain paper. Jack followed her out to the Ford pickup and jumped in when she opened the door. He went to the passenger side and stuck his head out the window as she backed the truck out of the shed, looking over at her, then out the window again as she drove down the lane and turned right onto the county road.

Roseman Bridge was dark. But Jack loped on ahead, checking things out while she carried a flashlight from the truck. She tacked the note on the left side of the entrance to the bridge and went home.

Quinn Fabray drove past Finn Hudson's mailbox an hour before dawn, alternately chewing on a Milky Way and taking bites from an apple, squeezing the coffee cup on the seat between her thighs to keep it from tipping over. She looked up at the white house standing in thin, late moonlight as she passed and shook her head at the stupidity of men, some men, most men. They could at least drink the brandy and not bang the screen door on their way out.

Rachel heard the out-of-tune pickup go by. She lay there in bed, having slept naked for the first time as far back as she could remember. She could imagine Quinn, hair blowing in the wind curling through the truck window, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a Camel.

She listened as the sound of her wheels faded toward Roseman Bridge. And she began to roll words over in her mind from the Yeats poem: "I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head..." Her rendering of it fell somewhere between that of teacher and supplicant.

Quinn parked the truck well back from the bridge so it wouldn't interfere with her compositions. From the small space behind the seat, she took a knee-high pair of rubber boots, sitting on the running board to unlace her leather ones and pull on the others. One knapsack with straps over both shoulders, tripod slung over her left shoulder by its leather strap, the other knapsack in her right hand, she worked her way down the steep bank toward the stream.

The trick would be to put the bridge at an angle for some compositional tension, get a little of the stream at the same time, and miss the graffiti on the walls near the entrance. The telephone wires in the background were a problem, too, but that could be handled through careful framing.

She took out the Nikon loaded with Kodachrome and screwed it onto the heavy tripod. The camera had the 24-millimeter lens on it, and she replaced that with her favorite light in the east now, and she began to experiment with her composition. Move tripod two feet left, readjust legs sticking in muddy ground by the stream. She kept the camera strap wound over her left wrist, a practice she always followed when working around water. She'd seen too many cameras go into the water when tripods tipped over.

Just as she fired the shutter, something caught her eye. She looked through the viewfinder again. "What the hell is hanging by the entrance to the bridge?" she muttered. "A piece of paper. Wasn't there yesterday."

Tripod steady. Run up the bank with sun coming fast behind her. Paper neatly tacked to bridge. Pull it off, put tack and paper in vest pocket. Back toward the bank, down it, behind the camera. Sun 60 percent up.

Breathing hard from the sprint. Shoot again. Repeat twice for duplicates. No wind, grass still. Shoot three at two seconds and three at one-half second for insurance.

Click lens to f/16 setting. Repeat entire process. Carry tripod and camera to the middle of the stream. Get set up, silt from footsteps moving away behind. Shoot entire sequence again. New roll of Kodachrome. Switch lenses. Lock on the 24-millimeter, jam the 105 into a pocket. Move closer to the bridge, wading upstream. Adjust, level, light check, fire three, and bracket shots for insurance.

Flip the camera to vertical, recompose. Shoot again. Same sequence, methodical. There never was anything clumsy about her movements. All were practiced, all had a reason, the contingencies were covered, efficiently and professionally.

Up the bank, through the bridge, running with the equipment, racing the sun. Now the tough one. Grab second camera with faster film, sling both cameras around neck, climb tree behind bridge. Scrape arm on bark-"Dammit!"- keep climbing. High up now, looking down on the bridge at an angle with the stream catching sunlight.

Use spot meter to isolate bridge roof, then shady side of bridge. Take reading off water. Set camera for compromise. Shoot nine shots, bracketing, camera resting on vest wedged into tree crotch. Switch cameras. Faster film. Shoot a dozen more shots.

After twenty intense minutes of the kind understood only by soldiers, surgeons, and photographers, Quinn Fabray swung her knapsacks into the truck and headed back down the road she had come along before. It was fifteen minutes to Hogback Bridge northwest of town, and she might just get some shots there if she hurried.

Dust flying, Camel lit, truck bouncing, past the white frame house facing north, past Finn Hudson's mailbox. No sign of her.

What did you expect? She's married, doing okay. You're doing okay. Who needs those kinds of complications? Nice evening, nice supper, nice woman. Leave it at that. God, she's lovely, though, and there's something about her. Something. I have trouble taking my eyes away from her.

Rachel was in the barn doing chores when she barreled past her place. Noise from the livestock cloaked any sound from the road. And Quinn Fabray headed for Hogback Bridge, racing the years, chasing the light.

Things went well at the second bridge. It sat in a valley and still had mist rising around it when she arrived. The 300-millimeter lens gave her a big sun in the upper-left part of her frame, with the rest taking in the winding white rock road toward the bridge and the bridge itself.

Then into her viewfinder came a farmer driving a team of light brown Belgians pulling a wagon along the white road. One of the last of the oldstyle boys, Quinn thought, grinning. She knew when the good ones came by and could already see what the final print would look like as she worked. On the vertical shots Quinn left some light sky where a title could go.

She had shot all or part of seven rolls of film, emptied the three cameras, and reached into the lower-left pocket of her vest to get the other four. "Damn!" The thumbtack pricked her index finger. She had forgotten about dropping it in the pocket when she'd removed the piece of paper from Roseman Bridge. In fact, Quinn had forgotten about the piece of paper. She fished it out, opened it, and read: "If you'd like supper again when 'white moths are on the wing,' come by tonight after you're finished. Anytime is fine."

The blonde couldn't help smiling a little, imagining Rachel Berry with her note and thumbtack driving through the darkness to the bridge. In five minutes she was back in town. While the Texaco man filled the tank and checked the oil ("Down half a quart"), Quinn used the pay telephone at the station. The thin phone book was grimy from being thumbed by filling station hands. There were two listings under "F. Hudson," but one had a town address.

She dialed the rural number and waited. Rachel was feeding the dog on the back porch when the phone rang in the kitchen. She caught it at the front of the second ring: "Hudson's."

"Hi, this is Quinn Fabray."

Her insides jumped again, just as they had yesterday. A little stab of something that started in her chest and plunged to her stomach.

"Got your note. W. B . Yeats as a messenger and all that. I accept the invitation, but it might be late. The weather's pretty good, so I'm planning on shooting the- let's see, what's it called? -the Cedar Bridge... this evening. It could be after nine before I'm finished. Then I'll want to clean up a bit. So I might not be there until nine-thirty or ten. Is that all right?"

No, it wasn't all right. She didn't want to wait that long, but she only said, "Oh, sure. Get your work done; that's what's important. I'll fix something that'll be easy to warm up when you get here."

Then Quinn added, "If you want to come along while I'm shooting, that's fine. It won't bother me. I could stop by for you about five-thirty."

Rachel's mind worked the problem. She wanted to go with her. But what if someone saw her? What could she say to Finn if he found out?

Cedar Bridge sat fifty yards upstream from and parallel to the new road and its concrete bridge. She wouldn't be too noticeable. Or would she? In less than two seconds, she decided. "Yes, I'd like that. But I'll drive my pickup and meet you there. What time?"

"About six. I'll see you then. Okay? 'Bye." Quinn spent the rest of the day at the local newspaper office looking through old editions. It was a pretty town, with a nice courthouse square, and she sat there on a bench in the shade at lunch with a small sack of fruit and some bread, along with a Coke from a café across the street.

When she had walked in the cafe, it was a little after noon. Like an old Wild West saloon when the regional gunfighter appeared, the busy conversation had stopped for a moment while they all looked her over. She hated that, felt self-conscious; but it was the standard procedure in small towns. Someone new! Someone different! Who is her? What's she doing here?

"Somebody said she's a photographer. Said they saw her out by Hogback Bridge this morning with all sorts of cameras."

"Sign on her truck says she's from Washington, out west."

"Been over to the newspaper office all morning. Jim says she's looking through the papers for information on the covered bridges."

"Yeah, young Fischer at the Texaco said she stopped in yesterday and asked directions to all the covered bridges."

"What's she wanna know about them for, anyway?"

"And why in the world would anybody wanna take pictures of 'em? They're just all fallin' down in bad shape."

Quinn wants to finish her lunch as quickly as possible. At that moment, someone enters the restaurant and all the conversation stops. She overhears one waitress turn to the other and whisper – "God. It's Santana Lopez." – "Apparently Mr. Evans caught them ." The other waitress replied.

Both the Waitress and Quinn, though more subtly turn to see a latina women, about 5'5", black hair and eyes. She remember Rachel telling her about Santana Lopez and Brittany Pierce´s affaire and how brittany´s husband Sam Evans caught them, something absolutely shocking and forbidden for the people of Madison County.

As Santana crosses the counter, Quinn immediately picks up on the vibes in the room. She notices all the patrons stare then turns away to whisper. The waitress behind the counter ignores her. A customer eating at the counter places a bag on an empty stool beside her, so the Santana Lopez can't sit down near her. Quinn and the Santana's eyes meet. The latina is clearly uncomfortable. She turns, about to leave, when Quinn clears her cameras off of a stool next to her and offers: "Got room right here if you like."

She is surprised at the blonde´s courtesy. Others are astounded. Some disgusted. She accepts her offer and sits beside her. "Thank you."

"Hot out there today." Quinn says.

She nods and smiles. The waitress tosses a menu at her and slams down a glass of water, then moves on down the counter.

Santana tries to act casual, glancing through the menu. Quinn subtly scans the room as all eyes are on them, then turn away. The blonde returns her glace back to the Santana who is now only pretending to read the menu. She is so embarrassed. She wants to leave but can't move.

The waitress suddenly says "Well, are you ordering anything!?"

Her harsh tone startles both Quinn and Santana. Gathering her dignity, she responds. "No. Thank you. I've changed my mind."

She politely nods to Quinn, gathers her things and exits the coffee shop

Quinn looks to the waitress, as other waitress enters. "I'd've thrown that water right in her face." "Poor Mr. Evans"

Maybe she'd made a mistake in inviting Rachel, for her sake, not Quinn´s. If someone saw her at Cedar Bridge, word would hit the cafe next morning at breakfast, relayed by young Fischer at the Texaco station after taking a handoff from the passer by. Probably quicker than that.

She'd learned never to underestimate the telecommunicative flash of trivial news in small towns. Two million children could be dying of hunger in the Sudan, and that wouldn't cause a bump in consciousness. But Finn Hudson's wife seen with a blonde-haired stranger- now that was news! News to be passed around, news to be chewed on, news that created a vague carnal lapping in the minds of those who heard it, the only such ripple they'd feel that year.

She finished her lunch and walked to a general store to buy a six pack of beer for her cooler and approaches the counter for the Cashier. "That all?"

Quinn nods and decides to have some fun and test the waters a little bit. "Isn't it awful about poor Mr. Evans?" she said.

With this, the damn bursts – and the cashier starts an angry rant "Tragic is more like it. The pain that man has been subjected to by that no-good wife. I never liked her. Known her for years. People say she's quiet. Well, it's the quiet ones that can sneak up behind you and stab you in the back. I heard yesterday, that they confront him and told him they were in love, two women in love, pffs, poor man.

Quinn stands astounded, listening to this diatribe of gossip.

Later she walked over to the public phone on the parking of the courthouse. Dialed her number. She answered, slightly breathless, on the third ring. "Hi, it's Quinn Fabray again."

Rachel´s stomach tightened instantly as she thought, She can't come; she's called to say that.

"Let me be direct. If it's a problem for you to come out with me tonight, given the curiosity of small-town people, don't feel pressured to do it. Frankly, I could care less what they think of me around here, and one way or the other, I'll come by later. What I'm trying to say is that I might have made an error in inviting you, so don't feel compelled in any way to do it. Though I'd love to have you along."

She'd been thinking about just that since they'd talked earlier. But she had decided. "No, I'd like to see you do your work. I'm not worried about talk." She was worried, but something in her had taken hold, something to do with risk. Whatever the cost; she was going out to Cedar Bridge.

"Great. Just thought I'd check. See you later."

"Okay." Quinn was sensitive, but she already knew that.

At four o'clock she stopped by her motel and did some laundry in the sink, put on a clean shirt, and tossed a second one in the truck, along with a pair of khaki slacks and brown sandals she'd picked up in India while doing a story on the baby railroad up to Darjeeling. At a tavern she purchased two six packs of Budweiser. Eight of the bottles, all that would fit, she arranged around her film in the cooler.

Hot, real hot again. The late afternoon sun in Iowa piled itself on top of its earlier damage, which had been absorbed by cement and brick and earth. It fairly blistered down out of the west.

The tavern had been dark and passably cool, with the front door open and big fans on the ceiling and one on a stand by the door whirring at about a hundred and five decibels. Somehow, though, the noise of the fans, the smell of stale beer and smoke, the blare of the jukebox, and the semihostile faces staring at her from along the bar made it seem hotter than it really was.

Out on the road the sunlight almost hurt, and she thought about the Cascades and fir trees and breezes along the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, near Kydaka Point.

Rachel looked cool, though. She was leaning against the fender of her Ford pickup where she had parked it behind some trees near the bridge. She had on the same jeans that fit her so well, sandals, and a white cotton T -shirt that did nice things for her body. Quinn waved as she pulled up next to her truck.

"Hi. Nice to see you. Pretty hot," Quinn said. Innocuous talk, around-the-edges-of-things talk. That old uneasiness again, just being in the presence of a woman for whom she felt something. She never knew quite what to say, unless the talk was serious. Even though her sense of humor was well developed, if a little bizarre, the blonde had a fundamentally serious mind and took things seriously. Her mother had always said she was an adult at four years of age. That served her well as a professional. To her way of thinking, though, it did not serve her well around women such as Rachel Berry.

"I wanted to watch you make your pictures. 'Shoot,' as you call it ."

"Well, you're about to see it, and you'll find it pretty boring. At least other people generally do. It's not like listening to someone practice the piano, where you can be part of it. In photography, production and performance are separated by a long time span. Today I'm doing production. When the pictures appear somewhere, that's the performance. All you're going to see is a lot of fiddling around. But you're more than welcome. In fact, I'm glad you came."

She hung on those last four words. Quinn needn't have said them. She could have stopped with "welcome," but she didn't. The photographer was genuinely glad to see her; that was clear. She hoped the fact she was here implied something of the same to Quinn.

"Can I help you in some way?" she asked as Quinn pulled on her rubber boots.

"You can carry that blue knapsack. I'll take the tan one and the tripod."

So Rachel became a photographer's assistant. The blonde had been wrong. There was much to see. There was a performance of sorts, though she was not aware of it . It was what Rachel had noticed yesterday and part of what drew her toward Quinn. Her grace, her quick eyes, the muscles along her forearms working. Mostly the way she moved her body.

It wasn't that she hurried. In fact, she didn't hurry at all. There was a gazellelike quality about her, though she could tell she was strong in a supple way. Maybe she, was more like a leopard than a gazelle. Yes. Leopard, that was it. Quinn was not prey. Quite the reverse, she sensed.

"Rach, give me the camera with the blue strap, please."

She opened the knapsack, feeling a little overcautious about the expensive equipment she handled so casually, and took out the camera. It said "Nikon" on the chrome plating of the viewfinder,with an "F" to the upper left of the name.

Quinn reached under the tripod head and unscrewed the camera on it, which was replaced by the one Rachel had given her. While she fastened on the new one, she turned her head toward the brunette and grinned. "Thanks, you're a first-class assistant." And made her flushed a little.

God, what was it about her! She was like some star creature who had drafted in on the tail of a comet and dropped off at the end of her lane. Why can't I just say "you're welcome"? she thought. I feel sort of slow around her, though it's nothing she does. It's me, not her. I'm just not used to being with people whose minds work as fast as her does.

Quinn moved into the creek, then up the other bank. Rachel went through the bridge with the blue knapsack and stood behind her, happy, strangely happy. There was energy here, a power of some kind in the way she worked. She didn't just wait for nature, she took it over in a gentle way, shaping it to her vision, making it fit what she saw in her mind.

The blonde imposed her will on the scene, countering changes in light with different lenses, different films, a filter occasionally. She didn't just fight back, she dominated, using skill and intellect. Farmers also dominated the land with chemicals and bulldozers. But Quinn Fabray's way of changing nature was elastic and always left things in their original form when she finished.

Rachel looked at the jeans pulling themselves tight around Quinn´s thigh muscles as she knelt down. At the faded denim shirt sticking to her back. At how she sat back on her haunches to adjust a piece of equipment, and for the first time in ever so long, she grew wet between her legs just watching someone. When she felt it, she looked up at the evening sky and breathed deeply, listening to her quietly curse a jammed filter that wouldn't unscrew from a lens.

Quinn crossed the creek again back toward the trucks, sloshing along in her rubber boots. Rachel went into the covered bridge, and when she came out the other end, Quinn was crouched and pointing a camera toward her. She fired, cocked the shutter, and fired a second and third time as she walked toward her along the road. She felt herself grin in mild embarrassment.

"Don't worry." Quinn smiled. "I won't use those anywhere without your permission. I'm finished here. Think I'll stop by the motel and rinse off a bit before coming out."

"Well, you can if you want. But I can spare a towel or a shower or the pump or whatever," she said quietly, earnestly.

"Okay, you're on. Go ahead. I'll load the equipment in Harry- that's my truck- and be right there."

She backed Finn's new Ford out of the trees and took it up on the main road away from the bridge, turned right, and headed toward Winterset, where she cut southwest toward home. The dust was too thick for her to see if he was following, though once, coming around a curve, she thought she could see her lights a mile back, rattling along in the truck she called Harry.

It must have been her, for she heard her truck coming up the lane just after she arrived. Jack barked at first but settled down right away, muttering to himself, "Same guy as last night; okay, I guess." Fabray stopped for a moment to talk with him.

Rachel stepped out of the back porch door. "Shower?"

"That'd be great. Show me the way."

She took her upstairs to the bathroom she had insisted Finn put in when the children were growing up. That was one of the few demands on which she had stood firm. She liked long hot baths in the evening, and she wasn't going to deal with teenagers tromping around in her private spaces. Finn used the other bath, said he felt uncomfortable with all the feminine things in hers. "Too fussy," were his words.

The bath could be reached only through their bedroom. She opened the door to it and took out an assortment of towels and a washcloth from a cupboard under the sink. "Use anything you want." She smiled while biting her lower lip slightly.

"I might borrow some shampoo if you can spare it . Mine's at the motel."

"Sure. Take your pick." She set three different bottles on the counter, each partly used.

"Thanks." She tossed her fresh clothes on the bed, and Rachel noted the khakis, white shirt, and sandals.

She went downstairs and heard the shower come on. She's naked now, she thought, and felt funny in her lower belly.

Earlier in the day, after Quinn called, she had driven the forty miles into Des Moines and went to the state liquor store. She was not experienced in this and asked a clerk about a good wine. He didn't know any more than she did, which was nothing. So she looked through the rows of bottles until she came across a label that read "Valpolicella." She remembered that from a long time ago. Dry, Italian red wine. She bought two bottles and another decanter of brandy, feeling sensual and worldly.

Next she looked for a new summer dress from a shop downtown. She found one, light pink with thin straps. It scooped down in back, did the same in front rather dramatically so the tops of her breasts were exposed, and gathered around her waist with a narrow sash. And new white sandals, expensive ones, flat-heeled, with delicate handiwork on the straps.

In the afternoon she fixed stuffed peppers, filling them with a mixture of tomato sauce, brown rice, cheese, and chopped parsley. Then came a simple spinach salad, corn bread, and an applesauce soufflé for dessert. All of it, except the soufflé, went into the refrigerator.

She hurried to shorten her dress to knee length. The Des Moines Register had carried an article earlier in the summer saying that was the preferred length this year. She always had thought fashion and all it implied pretty weird, people behaving sheeplike in the service of European designers. But the length suited her, so that's where the hem went.

The wine was a problem. People around here kept it in the refrigerator,though in Italy they never had done that. Yet it was too warm just to let it sit on the counter. Then she remembered the spring house. It was about sixty degrees in there in the summer, so she put the wine along the wall.

The shower shut off upstairs just as the phone rang. It was Finn, calling from Illinois.

"Everything okay?" "Yes."

"Carolyn's steer'll be judged on Wednesday. Some other things we want to see next day. Be home Friday,late."

"All right, have a good time and drive carefully."

"Rach, you sure you're okay? Sound a little strange."

"No, I'm fine. Just hot. I'll be better after my bath."

" hello to Jack for me."

"Yes, I'll do that." She glanced at Jack sprawled on the cement of the back porch floor.

Quinn Fabray came down the stairs and into the kitchen. White button-down-collar shirt, sleeves rolled up to just above the elbow, light khaki slacks, brown sandals, silver bracelet, top two buttons of her shirt open, silver chain. Her hair was still damp and brushed neatly.

"I'll just take my field duds out to the truck and bring in the gear for a little cleaning."

"Go ahead. I'm going to take a bath." "Want a beer with your bath?"

"If you have an extra one."

She brought in the cooler first, lifted out a beer for her, and opened it, while she found two tall glasses that would serve as mugs. When she went back to the truck for the cameras, she took her beer and went upstairs, noted that Quinn had cleaned the tub, and then ran a high, warm bath for herself, settling in with her glass on the floor beside her while she shaved and soaped. Quinn had been here just a few minutes before; she was lying where the water had run down her body, and she found that intensely erotic. Almost everything about Quinn Fabray had begun to seem erotic to her.

Something as simple as a cold glass of beer at bath time felt so elegant. Why didn't she and Finn live this way? Part of it, she knew, was the inertia of protracted custom. All marriages, all relationships, are susceptible to that. Custom brings predictability, and predictability carries its own comforts; she was aware of that, too.

And there was the farm. Like a demanding invalid, it needed constant attention, even though the steady substitution of equipment for human labor had made much of the work less onerous than it had been in the past.

But there was something more going on here. Predictability is one thing, fear of change is something else. And Finn was afraid of change, any kind of change, in their marriage. Didn't want to talk about it in general. Didn't want to talk about sex in particular. Eroticism was, in some way, dangerous business, unseemly to his way of thinking.

But he wasn't alone and really wasn't to blame. What was the barrier to freedom that had been erected out here? Not just on their farm, but in the rural culture. Maybe urban culture, for that the walls and the fences preventing open, natural relationships between men and women? Why the lack of intimacy,the absence of eroticism?

The women's magazines talked about these matters. And women were starting to have expectations about their allotted place in the grander scheme of things, as well as what transpired in the bedrooms of their lives.

Walking into the bedroom, toweling off, she noted it was a little after ten. Still hot, but the bath had cooled her. From the closet she took the new dress.

She pulled her long brown hair behind her and fastened it with a silver clasp. Silver earrings, large hooped ones, and a loose-fitting silver bracelet she also had bought in Des Moines that morning.

The Wind Song perfume again. A little lipstick on the high cheekboned, Latin face, the shade of pink even lighter than the dress. Her natural tan accented the whole outfit. Her slim legs came out from under the hem looking just fine.

She turned first one way, then the other, looking at herself in the bureau mirror. That's about as good as I can do, she thought. And then, pleased, said half out loud, "It's pretty good, though."

Quinn was working on her second beer and repacking the cameras when she came into the kitchen. She looked up at Rachel.

"Jesus," she said softly. All of the feelings, all of the searching and reflecting, a lifetime of feeling and searching and reflecting, came together at that moment. And Quinn fell in love with Rachel Berry, farmer's wife, of Madison County, Iowa, long ago from Naples.

"I mean"- her voice was a little shaky, a little rough- "if you don't mind my boldness, you look stunning. Make-'em-run-around-the-block-howling-in-agony stunning. I'm serious. You're big-time elegant, Rach, in the purest sense of that word."

Quinn´s admiration was genuine, she could tell. She reveled in it, bathed in it, let it swirl over her and into the pores of her skin like soft oil from the hands of some deity somewhere who had deserted her years ago and had now returned.

And, in the catch of that moment, she fell in love with Quinn Fabray, photographer-writer, from Bellingham, Washington, who drove an old pickup truck named Harry.

**_Thanks For Reading :)_**


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